Tag: Bing

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Digital Marketing

A Guide to Bing Webmaster Tools

While Google continues to retain a share of over 90 percent of the worldwide search engine market, webmasters and marketers shouldn’t be so quick to overlook Bing, the runner-up in the industry.

Despite its relatively tiny worldwide market share of about 2.7 percent, Bing has a US market share of 36.96 percent.

More interestingly, Bing plays a role in searches most users aren’t even aware are interfacing with Bing – such as search functions in pretty much every single Microsoft product, including the 1.3 billion devices throughout the world using Windows 10. And while those 37 percent amount to about 66 million Americans searching through Bing alone, 62 million users use BOTH Bing and Google.

Even two of the most popular voice assistants on the market – Cortana and Alexa – run their searches through Bing. Furthermore, Bing’s largest age group is primarily older, in the age range of 45-54, with an average annual income above $100,000.

In other words, if you want your website traffic to increase, especially domestically, you need to be looking at the bigger picture.

How is Ranking on Bing Different?

First, let’s go over what isn’t all that different. You might not be surprised to learn that many of the cardinal rules of Google SEO continue to play an important role in Bing. That means:

  • Create relevant and high-quality content.
  • Pay attention to your Domain and Page Authorities.
  • User experience matters (including technical SEO, such as website speed, website architecture, and mobile-friendliness).
  • Quality backlinks go a long way (though they’re less important on Bing than Google)

That being said, there are still differences. These include:

  • Bing prioritizes authority based on age and official domains. This means it’s more likely to rank websites that are established longer, as well as resources from .gov and .edu pages. I.e., Bing prefers what it feels might be more relevant or factual, rather than what might be more popular.
  • Bing places a lot of importance on user engagement. This means it pays to heed especially to how users interact with your website, including your bounce rate. Minimizing your bounce rate (by targeting your SEO towards users who are more likely to stick around and improving your UX) may be more important on Bing than Google.
  • Social signals score big points, perhaps even more so than for Google searches. This means pages that have been frequently posted, reposted, retweeted, shared, and liked on multiple social media platforms may rank higher on Bing.

These are just some of the differences between the two. Thankfully, Microsoft offers webmasters a variety of tools to get started on optimizing their website for the Bing search engine, through the Bing Webmaster Tools. Microsoft’s free service can help you better monitor your website’s metrics, send your website to Bing to be crawled and indexed, and improve your SEO natively.

What Can Bing Webmaster Tools Do?

The current iteration of Bing Webmaster Tools is a web-based, mobile-friendly service built accessible via Bing. After verifying ownership of your website, Bing Webmaster Tools lets you:

  • Submit URLs for indexing.The primary feature Bing Webmaster Tool is used for is its site indexing. That feature is now automated, allowing webmasters to index new or updated content via their native Bing Webmaster Tools URLs submission API, compatible with most content management systems (CMS). Webmasters may index up to 10,000 URLs per day.

    You can also temporarily block URLs, so certain content will be blocked and removed from Bing for a total of 90 days. This is an option if you need certain content to remain unseen for a time, but not deleted.

  • Review and troubleshoot crawl issues, as well as set preferences for how Bingbot crawls your page.Bing’s Crawl Control feature lets you control the rate at which Bing crawls your pages, allowing you to minimize crawling at peak hours to reduce pressure on the hosting server, for example.

    Bing also includes a Verify Bingbot feature that lets you input unknown IPs found on your server log to check if they’re one of Bing’s, or not (and let you subsequently block the fake bot).

  • Review your backlinks via a curated Backlinks report (sorted by Domain, Page, and Anchor text).Bing’s Backlinks report feature lets you sort data by domain, page, and anchor text, view Similar Sites to yours, or block (disavow) specific backlinks.
  • Check out Bing’s keyword research tool.Like Google’s keyword research tools, Bing’s version is designed to help webmasters and content creators find specific terms to rank for.
  • Check if you meet certain technical standards on your domain and pages.These include W3C standards on web design, web architecture, and more, as well as Robots.txt specifications.
  • Review how Bing is processing and viewing your Sitemap.While you only need to submit a sitemap once, you can review and update your sitemap daily.
  • Review your search performance on Bing.This translates into specific trackable metrics that Bing uses to give you an idea of how your site is performing on the search engine, including total clicks, total impressions, click-through rate (CTR), and your average position per ranking keyword over the last six months.
  • And even download certain data as a CSV file.You can download data tables on the first thousand searches as a CSV file.

Confused? You can check out Bing’s official webmaster blog for a more in-depth look at each feature, as well as keep up to date on new features as they’re announced and rolled out.

Bing Webmaster Tools and Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft launched Microsoft Clarity in late 2020 and has since integrated some of its new tools into Bing Webmaster Tools, including session playbacks, heatmaps, and data-driven insights. These help webmasters further narrow down how users experience their content, and where they might want to make improvements (or build on existing strengths.

Bing Webmaster Tools can offer you a comprehensive view of your website through Bing’s eyes and keep you in the know on how to refocus and reformulate your SEO strategy to account for Bing’s preferences.

Need a partner to help you navigate through today’s SEO landscape? Send us a message. We’ll help you rank on both Google and Bing – and greatly improve your traffic.

Categories
SEO

Bing Announces Link Penalties: SEO is Changing

Bing announces link penalties, signaling SEO is changing on the search engine. Bing’s announcement on link penalties signaled its crackdown on manipulative link practices. Penalties target unnatural links, including purchased links and participation in link schemes, aiming to ensure fair and quality search results. This move emphasizes the importance of ethical SEO practices and encourages website owners to focus on building natural, high-quality backlinks for better search engine rankings.

**This post was selected as one of the top digital marketing articles of the week by UpCity, a B2B ratings and review company for digital marketing agencies and other marketing service providers.**

As marketers and SEOs, the industry tends to focus most of its attention on Google. It is after all the search engine with the largest market share. According to Statista, in July 2019, it held 88.61% of the overall market share, while Bing accounted for 4.98%. However, failing to consider other search engines in a digital marketing strategy can prove harmful for many businesses.

That said, Bing has recently announced new link penalties that are focused on taking down private blog networks (PBNs), subdomain leasing, and manipulative cross-site linking.

Inorganic Site Structure

Bing wants to penalize what it calls “inorganic site structure.” Inorganic site structure refers to a linking pattern that uses internal site leveling signals with subdomains or cross-site linking patterns with external domains in an attempt to manipulate search engine rankings. These spam techniques have existed for years, but Bing introduced the concept of calling them inorganic site structure as a way to describe them.

Bing has noted that sites legitimately create subdomains to keep parts of the site separate such as support.domain.com or app.domain.com. The search engine maintains they will treat those domains as belonging to the main domain passing site-level signals to the subdomains.

Bing also said that sites like WordPress create stand-alone websites under subdomains. This is what happens when you create a site at WordPress.com. in this case, no site-level signals pass to those subdomains.

Having a definition of website boundaries is vital because algorithms assign different values to internal links than they do external links.

What Constitutes an Inorganic Site Structure?

An inorganic site structure happens when a company leases a subdomain to take advantage of site-level signals to increase search engine rank. Bing has included PBNs as part of an organic site structure.

“If your internal links are viewed as external, you can get a nice rank boost,” Bing says in its blog post, “And if you can propagate some of the site-level signals to pages that don’t technically belong to your website, these pages can get an unfair advantage.”

PBNs

PBNs are scheme networks that exist to manipulate the search engines by artificially passing link equity to other sites so that the target sites rank higher. Participating in this type of activity is already a violation of Bing’s link policy. However, going forward, it will also be in breach of the inorganic site structure policy and may be subject to additional penalties.

Doorway and Duplicate Content

Bing has seen an increase in the creation of dozens of doorway sites trying to rank for different keywords sets.

The doorways are designed to look like multiple independent sites, but they redirect to the same destination, which deceives the users who click through. Because duplicate content is such a common occurrence, Bing has said they will assess the intent of the content before designating it a violation of the inorganic site structure policy.

Subdomain Leasing

Leasing a subdomain to a different entity makes it challenging to determine how involved the main domain owner is, which makes it hard to tell whether the subdomain should be considered part of the Moon website.

Bing noted that a lack of easily accessible and direct navigation between the main site and a subdomain was a common issue between all of the cases they reviewed. Therefore the intent was clearly to benefit from site-level signals even though the content on the subdomain had little to do with the content on the rest of the domain.”

Bing acknowledged that some consider allowing a third party to rent and operate a subdomain as a legitimate way to earn money from a website. They had this to say:

“However, in this case, the practice equates to buying ranking signals, which is not much different from buying links. Therefore, we decided to consider ‘subdomain leasing’ a violation of our ‘inorganic site structure’ policy when it is clearly used to bring a completely unrelated third-party service into the website boundary, for the sole purpose of leaking site-level signals to that service.”

In the majority of subdomain leasing cases, the penalty would only apply to the least subdomain and not the root domain.

Why This Matters

The violations mentioned in their blog post may be tempting shortcuts to achieve higher ranks. Apparently, enough site owners have begun to use them to warrant a new penalty. Regardless of what new black-hat search engine optimization tactics you may struggle across, understand that getting caught can have dire consequences for your organic visibility and may even result in delisting. In this situation, there is no shortcut for making a comeback.

As website owners, you may also be held responsible for the content hosted under your domain. If you were to offer free hosting on your subdomains and 95% of them are flagged as spam, Bing says they will expand the penalties to the entire domain even if the root website itself is not spam. Penalties may also be generalized for subdirectories or subfolders that thing suspect have been hacked.

When you hire a search engine optimization and digital marketing firm to handle your online properties for you, you must trust that they do not engage in black hat SEO tricks. Relying on these tactics, such as domain leasing and doorway content to boost your ranking, only hurts in the end. Here at Sach’s Marketing Group, we use only approved methods for increasing your ranking. That’s why you’ll see natural growth over time, rather than fast results.

We’re glad to hear Bing is making improvements to provide quality, relevant results to its users. Competition between search engines encourages innovation. As we see Bing continue to improve, we may see search traffic become more diversified as people leave Google in favor of Bing and other search engines.

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